Still Missing: Rethinking the D.B. Cooper Case and Other Mysterious Unsolved Disappearances (18 page)

Jo later reasoned that Weber was obviously confessing to being the legendary skyjacker “D.B. Cooper.” She researched her late husband’s past and also checked out a book from her local library about the Cooper case. She found the similarities between Weber and Cooper were uncanny. They both had similar haircuts, they both were similar in height, they both smoked cigarettes and they both drank bourbon.

Jo also claimed Weber once awoke from a dream panicked, after blurting out that he had left his finger prints on the “aft stairs.” She also remembered taking a trip with Weber to the Columbia River and at one time, he had a canvas bag which resembled Cooper’s ransom bag.

Jo Weber decided to call the FBI and reported her findings, but found the FBI was not very interested in her theories. She persisted, and eventually, the FBI started investigating Weber. The FBI found Jo’s evidence circumstantial at best. They compared his fingerprints to the ones found on the plane and they did not match. In 2007, his DNA was tested and compared to the Cooper DNA samples. The result was negative. The FBI no longer considers Weber as a viable suspect in the Cooper case.

One of the most intriguing Cooper suspects is William “Wolfgang” Gossett. Details of Gosset can be found in the following excerpts from a well-written
Ogden Standard Examiner
article, penned by Scott Schwebke, which appeared in the May 23rd, 2010 edition of the paper:

D.B. COOPER MYSTERY

OGDEN -- A report of a fireball in the sky and a veiled threat from a mysterious man in a dark suit could aid a lawyer’s dogged quest to prove a former Weber State ROTC instructor was infamous skyjacker D.B. Cooper.

Galen Cook, a Spokane, Wash., attorney, who has been pursuing the Cooper case for more than two decades and is writing a book about his investigation, believes a woman named Janet may have seen the hijacker as he jumped from the plane carrying road flares and a $200,000 ransom.

Cook said in an e-mail to the
Standard-Examiner
. “I have a suspect (William “Wolfgang” Gossett) who worked for the military, was a trained military parachuter, had special knowledge of aircraft and CIA operations in Southeast Asia, was obsessed with road flares, and retired from the Army at Fort Lewis, Wash. (near where the D.B. Cooper incident took place).”

The Cooper case is perhaps the most baffling unsolved crime in FBI history.

On Nov. 24,1971, Cooper commandeered a Boeing 727 en route from Portland, Ore., to Seattle. After receiving a $200,000 ransom, walked down the plane’s rear stairs and parachuted into the stormy night.

Cook maintains Gossett, a former ROTC instructor at Weber State who was 73 when he died in 2003 in Oregon, is the elusive hijacker.

He described Gossett as the consummate chameleon who eluded authorities despite a string of highly visible jobs that included private investigator, radio talk show host and priest in the Old Roman Catholic Church.

Cook contends Gossett managed to keep his involvement in the Cooper caper under the radar of law enforcement, but confessed the crime to several people, including a son, Gregg Gossett, who lives in Ogden, Maurice Richards, an attorney from South Ogden, now deceased, and Jim Bjornsen, a close friend and lawyer in Newport, Ore.

Cook believes William Gossett planned the hijacking to coincide with Thanksgiving week vacation at Weber State so that he wouldn’t be missed.

Cook maintains William Gossett probably landed on the Oregon side of the Columbia River, somewhere west of Portland. After spending the night in the woods, he probably made his way to Portland International Airport, took a plane to San Francisco and then traveled to Utah, he said.

BATTLE GROUND SITE

The FBI now maintains that Cooper didn’t exit near Lake Merwin but near Battle Ground, Wash., about seven miles north of the Columbia River, but didn’t survive the jump because the parachute he used couldn’t be steered and his clothing and footwear weren’t suitable for a rough landing.

In 1980, 8-year-old Brian Ingram found on the banks of the Columbia River a rotting package of $20 bills totaling $5,800 that matched serial numbers of the Cooper ransom money, further bolstering the claim that the hijacker was killed, according to the FBI. However, the money could have been planted by William Gossett to throw off authorities, Cook said.

Cook maintains that while William Gossett may have needed the ransom money to pay off gambling debts, there was possibly a “higher moral mission” for the hijacking. He claims to have uncovered information indicating William Gossett may have committed the crime because he was upset about a clandestine government operation during the Vietnam conflict.

One Cooper suspect the FBI dismissed almost immediately is Ted Mayfield, who is an Army Special Forces veteran and skydiving instructor, as well as an ex-convict who served time for armed robbery and transportation of stolen aircraft. According to FBI Agent Ralph Himmelsbach, Mayfield was suggested repeatedly as a suspect early in the investigation, but was ruled out, based partly on the fact that he called Agent Himmelsbach less than two hours after Flight 305 landed in Reno to volunteer advice on skydiving and possible landing zones.

Initial FBI sketch of D.B. Cooper suspect

In 2006, two Cooper Slueths Daniel Dvorak and Matthew Myers proposed him as a suspect once again, attracting attention from a Portland television station and the TV show Inside Edition. The two claimed that they had assembled a substantial circumstantial case that would be detailed in a forthcoming book. Among other things, they theorized that Mayfield called Himmelsbach not to offer advice, but to establish an alibi, and they challenged Agent Himmelsbach’s conclusion that Mayfield could not possibly have found a telephone in time to call the FBI less than four hours after jumping into the wilderness at night. Mayfield denied any involvement. Mayfield claimed that Dvorak and Myers asked him to play along with their theory and told him “we’ll all make a lot of money.” Dvorak and Myers denied those claims. If any of the Cooper suspects were skilled of pulling off the skyjacking scheme, Mayfield and Richard Floyd McCoy would be the two most capable and qualified to do so. Mayfield is a respected veteran and resides in Sheridan, Oregon.

In 2006, FBI Special Agent Larry Carr was assigned to the Cooper case, and immediately started a campaign to reignite interest in the unsolved skyjacking in hopes of finding some sort of resolution to it.

According to the FBI’s official website, Special Agent Carr’s opinions on the Cooper suspect are:

“We originally thought Cooper was an experienced jumper, perhaps even a paratrooper. We concluded after a few years this was simply not true. No experienced parachutist would have jumped in the pitch-black night, in the rain, with a 200-mile-an-hour wind in his face, wearing loafers and a trench coat. It was simply too risky. He also missed that his reserve chute was only for training and had been sewn shut—something a skilled skydiver would have checked.”

“The hijacker had no help on the ground, either. To have utilized an accomplice, Cooper would’ve needed to coordinate closely with the flight crew so he could jump at just the right moment and hit the right drop zone. But Cooper simply said, “Fly to Mexico,” and he had no idea where he was when he jumped. There was also no visibility of the ground due to cloud cover at 5,000 feet.”

“The two flight attendants who spent the most time with him on the plane were interviewed separately the same night in separate cities and gave nearly identical descriptions,” articulates Carr. “They both said he was about 5′10″ to 6′, 170 to 180 pounds, in his mid-40s, with brown eyes. People on the ground who came into contact with him also gave very similar descriptions.”

The FBI website also states that like many agents before him, Agent Carr thinks it is highly unlikely that the Cooper suspect survived the jump. “Diving into the wilderness without a plan, without the right equipment, in such terrible conditions, he probably never even got his chute open.”

An article which appeared in
The Spokesman Review
, a Spokane Washington newspaper, dated November 25, 2007, mentioned a couple other well known, but unlikely Cooper suspects: Kenny Christiansen and Barbara Dayton. The following excerpts from the article feature the major details of the suspects, and FBI special agent Larry Carr’s thoughts on the case.

TALES OF D.B. COOPER

STILL SWIRL

“I think D.B. Cooper died the night he jumped,” said Carr, sharing the belief of case agents before him.

But about once a month, the FBI gets calls insisting that theory is wrong.

One came from Lyle Christiansen, a 77-year-old Minnesota man, who swears his brother, Kenneth, was the man who got away. Kenneth Christiansen lived in Bonney Lake and looked like the FBI sketch of Cooper. He worked for a commercial airline and was a former paratrooper.

Lyle Christiansen was so sure his brother was the one, the FBI said, he sent agents several letters before going to the media with his story.

The FBI, however, said last month that Kenneth Christiansen wasn’t a viable suspect because he was 150 pounds and 5-foot-8, at least 4 inches and 30 pounds short of the description given by the flight attendants on the hijacked plane.

“But I’ve got information and I can show it,” an undeterred Christiansen said this week. “I know it was him.”

Ron Forman plans to talk about who he thinks is the true hijacker.

Forman said a friend of his—who was a loner, like the FBI described—confessed to Forman and his wife. The friend, who looked similar to the FBI sketch, was a proficient skydiver, an expert with dynamite and mysteriously disappeared in the days around the hijacking.

The kicker: Forman’s friend was a woman named Barbara Dayton; family and friends say she is believed to be the first person in Washington to have a sex-change operation.

“What a perfect alibi,” said her niece, Billie Dayton. “When my dad saw the FBI sketch, the first thing he said was, ‘That looks like Bobby.’ ”

Barbara was born Bobby Dayton in 1926 and had the operation in December 1969, according to family. Forman said Dayton, who lived in West Seattle and was a University of Washington librarian, dressed like a man for the hijacking and disguised her voice.

She said she never spent the $200,000 because she hid it in a Woodburn, Ore., cistern near where she landed, her family said, but Dayton later recanted the story after she realized she still could be prosecuted for the crime, family said.

Forman believes the small amount of money found in 1980 deteriorating on a Columbia River bank – the only money ever found and linked to Cooper – was planted by Dayton to spark interest in the case.

Carr said the $5,800 that was found several miles from the suspected drop zone had a questionable path, but he doesn’t buy Dayton’s story.

Her height also didn’t match descriptions from flight attendants, who sat close enough to know if Cooper actually was a woman, he said.

But even in the face of the FBI’s dismissal, Dayton’s family and friends still believe.

“People become so focused, they want their details to fit,” Carr said, adding the FBI has investigated nearly 1,000 suspects.

In July 2011, a woman by the name of Marla Cooper made the stunning claim that her uncle, Lynn Doyle Cooper, not only shared surnames with the infamous skyjacker, but also was actually the skyjacker himself. Lynn Doyle Cooper, who was often referred to as “L.D.” by those closest to him, was a Korean War veteran. As an 8-year-old, she recalled L.D. and another uncle planning something “very mischievous,” involving the use of “expensive walkie-talkies,” at her grandmother’s house in Sisters, Oregon, 150 miles south of Portland. The next day flight 305 was hijacked, and though the uncles allegedly were turkey hunting, L.D. Cooper came home wearing a bloody shirt. Her uncle claimed he was injured in an auto accident. Later, she said, her parents came to believe that L.D. Cooper was the hijacker.

Marla Cooper approached the FBI with her spectacular revelation, and the FBI soon began investigating. Print and television media outlets picked up the story and ran with it. On August 5th, 2011 NPR correspondent Tom Banse reported from Olympia Washington that the FBI had concluded that the DNA sample from the Cooper suspect’s tie did not match L.D. Cooper’s DNA profile. In his report, Banse also added:

A DNA test has failed to connect a deceased central Oregon man to the unsolved 1971 hijacking of a Northwest Orient jet. This according to the man’s niece. She came forward this week to finger her uncle as the legendary fugitive D.B. Cooper.